Product of a Bygone Era
by papapapeppa
Summary: Steve Rogers has been through a lot. He's always been a man who has prided himself on being able to adapt, to overcome. But there's a lot about this new world that he's been thrown into that he hasn't been able to accept. Maybe he's old-fashioned - but he liked the world the way it was. One-shot.


**Disclaimer: I own nothing**

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Steve Rogers was a trooper.

He was a soldier. A fighter. He'd seen the carnage of war up close and personal. He'd overcome his own limitations to become something more. He'd gotten himself to the top on sheer determination alone. He'd proved himself. He'd lost his mother, his father, his best friend...he could get through anything. He was stong.

But there came a certain point when even Steve had to stop and wonder if it was worth it. Sure, he'd gotten through all that. But that all felt like a lifetime ago, anymore.

Hell, it _was_ a lifetime ago. Seventy years was...a long time. A whole birth, and adolesence, and middle-age, and progression into elderly. He could have had his own kid in that time. He should have been dead. He was ninety-five years old, and he still looked and felt like he was in his thrities.

But that wasn't the worst part to Steve. He could handle that easily enough. He could stomach not being on the same aging plane as everyone else. He could adjust to the thought of getting an extra few decades out of his life. In fact, if he looked at it that way, it almost seemed nice. Less like a curse.

No, the worst part to him was the world that he'd woken up in itself. It wasn't the same one he'd left, that was for damn sure. Nothing about it felt the same. There were entire days he went through where he'd convince himself that he actually _had_ died, and that he was walking down the streets of hell. He wasn't sure how anybody managed to be happy at all in this version of the world. It was too hectic, too busy. Everything was loud noises and bright lights, and Steve hated it.

The buildings were so much taller. There'd been skyscrapers in the 40's, of course. That in it of itself was nothing new. But there were _so many_ of them now. And they'd almost doubled in size. When he walked down the street, he felt like an ant in the crack of a sidewalk. The sky looked much farther away than it ever had before.

And then there were things like Times Square. There again, it _had_ been around...back then. But it'd changed so much that it was nearly unrecognizeable. Before, it'd just been lights. Dazzling lights. Arranged in great signs and displays. Sure, it was still ads, but there was a kind of beauty to it. Now it was all screens, and videos, and the harsh blue glare of LED's. He avoided it at all costs. It felt like an assault from the 21st century.

Even the music was different. The music! If one could even call it that. For so long, he'd felt as if music was the one, universal thing. He'd seen Big Band music rally support at home, and lift the spirits of fellas abroad. The songs that didn't have words were the best. Didn't matter who you were, or where you were from. You could enjoy it easy enough. The music he remembered was easy to dance to - or at least, from what he'd seen it was. It seemed to invite people to bop along with it. Everything now was...all words. Some of it wasn't even _singing_. It was...talking to a beat. It was all man-made noise. Created with technology. There was no heart or soul to it. And the subject matter was always so explicit and crude. He wondered when that shift occurred. When people stopped dancing to songs about romance and love and started flailing to songs about sex and drugs.

Then there was the matter of the dancing itself. The dancing he remembered was so...uniform. Everyone was on the same page. Everyone knew the same dances, to the same songs. The dancing now was so sexual, and so everywhere at once. It was a frenzy, not a dance. But chaos seemed to be the law of the land in the present day anyway, and Steve seemed to be the only one who minded.

Even when he went to a cafe, he noticed a difference. To a certain extent, it was similar enough. Because bread was bread, and coffee was coffee, and that was fine with him. But everything was so artificial. The eggs were genetically modified and mass produced (he tried not to compare himself to them), and so was the milk, and the meat. The grain for the bread was overly processed, and they put too many preservatives in everything. There was too much cheese, and too much salt. The coffee was instant, and no one took the time to brew it anymore. The mugs were plastic instead of porcelain, and so were the plates. And so were the cups. And so was the silverware. Even the sugar was fake. Sure, Steve had seen artificial sweetner before, but never as plentifully as it seemed to be now. At any given metal table there was a plastic container of Splenda, Sweet N Low, Equal...all in brightly colored paper packages. And everyone seemed to use it. Sometimes, he couldn't even find packets of regular sugar. He remembered when artificial sweetners were used because they were cheap and sugar was being rationed heavily during the war. It was questionable then. People thought it was a health concern (he never could get a straight answer out of anyone if it was now or not). Now folks were doing it by choice. It didn't add up to him.

People dressed like they had no self-respect or parents, and behaved to match it.

There had been a day when Steve decided to venture out to an art supplies store to try and track down something he could draw on and draw with. He'd tried to brush off the insane noise of the city, and the decrepit look of certain parts of it. He'd attempted to swallow the sleek, bright look of all the cars now, and how fast they went. He got past the inexplicably rude attitude of most everyone around him, and the way that _every damn person_ in the subway car was holding some little electronic device, and even the gross price inflation. What he couldn't get past - what served as the straw that broke the camel's back for him - was that when he got into the section of the store he wanted to be in, even the supplies seemed to be a cheap imitation of what he remembered. The ink that came out of the pens wasn't as dark black, or have as nice of a flow. The tips were cheap looking, and didn't work properly. The paper itself wasn't thick and creamy like it was supposed to be - it had splinters floating in it, and was thin, and a white that made his eyes hurt. Even the pencils were mechanical. He'd wound up grabbing a ball-point Bic pen that he'd deamed to be decent and a sketchbook that didn't give him a headache, paying, and going back to his apartment as quickly as he could.

There were nights when Steve would lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, wondering if his bygone era was really as great as his memory found it to be. He'd fret, concerned that it was really all in his head. That the problem wasn't with the world today, but with _him_. That he was the cog in the gears that was messing everything up. He was the thing that didn't belong. The round peg in a square hole.

His sheets were itchy.

His fan was too powerful.

His clothes and shoes weren't as well made.

Everything came from a foreign country.

No one _else_ minded. But how could they? Steve was the only one who hadn't grown up in their world. They didn't know any better. But he did. He _did._ Oh, the things he remembered...

Steve remembered when computers didn't exist. When televisions were new, and rare, and no one he knew had one. When people listened to the radio instead, and payed attention to the news, and read newspapers and books. When people cared about the news and the world that they lived in. When all you had to do to put a smile on a child's face was hand them a small hand-made doll or a teddy bear - not a cell phone. When if you wanted to talk to someone, you had to pick up the phone and call them. When people wrote letters, and sent packages, and stopped by out of the blue to say hello. When there was a genuine amount of care for your fellow man. When people would say, "good morning" on the street, and then men still held doors for the ladies. When you had to buy a record if you wanted to listen to music, not _download_ it.

Maybe Steve was the problem. Maybe he was the one too rooted in his ways. Maybe he was just the product of an era that was so long gone that it didn't have any real affect on the world he found himself surrounded by then. Maybe his impact was insubstantial at best, and maybe no one really cared if he was still there or not. Maybe he was old-fashioned. And maybe the world he remembered was viewed as archaic now. Ancient. Something best left in the history books. Society had moved onward and upward. They'd left it - and him - in the dust.

But if you asked Steve, their world of "progress" was more backwards than the one he'd originated from.

And sometimes, late at night, when he was trying to fall asleep, he'd close his eyes, and tune everything out. And in those moments just before he fell asleep, he was back in the New York that he remembered. He could see Peggy's face, and feel Bucky's hand on his shoulder, and he could hear old music in the air. And he fell asleep in the comfort of the world he once knew.

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